Dan
Barker had a busy day on January 18. He began the day at the KTNF
studio for an interview on Atheists Talk Radio, filled the
afternoon with an appearance at the Roseville Library as the speaker
at our monthly public meeting, and after dinner with some meeting
attendees, presented a reading of excerpts from his new book at the
Midway Borders Book Store.

The
public meeting was by far our largest ever, with attendance estimated
at 140. Barker began by informing us of some recent activities of the
Freedom from Religion Foundation, the nation's largest
church/state separation watchdog organization. Barker and his wife,
Annie Laurie Gaylor, are co-presidents. They ran a quarter-page ad in
the Washington Post on Inauguration Day, headlined "Mr.
President, Rebuild that Wall!"

The
FFRF is now taking on the Wisconsin Technical College System, and 15
of the 16 public-supported technical colleges in Wisconsin, for
closing their campuses on Good Friday. In 1996 the FFRF won a solid
federal court victory overturning a state law declaring Good Friday a
state holiday. All of the schools except Green Bay currently close
for this exclusively Christian holiday. They expect to be able to get
the schools to comply with the 1996 decision without going to trial.

But
Barker's main order of business was to speak about his new
book, Godless. Barker stated that all of his previous books
had been published by the FFRF, but this time Ulysses Press sought
him out, and asked him do write an update of his autobiographical
Losing Faith in Faith. When he got to work on the project, it
became much more than an update. Godless contains new material
that any atheist will find useful in discussions with Christians.

Barker is especially proud of
Richard Dawkins' introduction to Godless. Dawkins wrote:
"The most eloquent witness of internal delusion that I know -
a triumphantly smiling refugee from the zany, surreal world of
American fundamentalist Protestantism - is Dan Barker."
And later, "Dan knows deeply what it is like to be a wingnut, a
faith-head, a fully paid-up nutjob, an all singing, all glossolaling
religious fruit bat."

Barker, who has contested over
sixty debates with Christians, is the most visible face of the
Freedom from Religion Foundation, which has doubled its membership in
the last two years. One spike of new members came when Fox News'
king of bombast and vitriol, Bill O'Reilly, began attacking him
and the FFRF. They are favorite villains of many media spokesmen on
the religious right, at least in part because of Barker's
penchant for deflating their pompous and presumptuous moralizing.
Having himself been one of them, he is aware that their deep-seated
need for a moral soap box, from which to strike a saintly pose.
Drawing on his extensive experience in debating Christians and his
intensive study of the Bible, Barker relentlessly drives down the
credibility of god-decreed, Bible-based moralizing.

Godless will surely
supplant Losing Faith in Faith as an absolute necessity in
every atheist's book collection.